For decades, the fields of physics and chemistry have maintained that the atoms and molecules that make up the natural world define the char
OKAY THIS ARTICLE IS SO COOL
I'm going to try to explain this in a comprehensible way, because honestly it's wild to wrap your head around even for me, who has a degree in chemistry. But bear with me.
Okay, so. Solids, right? They are rigid enough to hold their shape, but aside from that they are quite variable. Some solids are hard, others are soft, some are brittle or rubbery or malleable. So what determines these qualities? And what creates the rigid structure that makes a solid a solid? Most people would tell you that it depends on the atoms that make up the solid, and the bonds between those atoms. Rubber is flexible because of the polymers it's made of, steel is strong because of the metallic bonds between its atoms. And this applies to all solids. Or so everybody thought.
A paper published in the journal Nature has discovered that biological materials such as wood, fungi, cotton, hair, and anything else that can respond to the humidity in the environment may be composed of a new class of matter dubbed "hydration solids". That's because the rigidity and solidness of the materials doesn't actually come from the atoms and bonds, but from the water molecules hanging out in between.
So basically, try to imagine a hydration solid as a bunch of balloons taped together to form a giant cube, with the actual balloon part representing the atoms and bonds of the material, and the air filling the balloons as the water in the pores of the solid. What makes this "solid" cube shaped? It's not because of the rubber at all, but the air inside. If you took out all the air from inside the balloons, the structure wouldn't be able to hold its shape.
Ozger Sahin, one of the paper's authors, said
"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place. It's really water's world."
And the great thing about this discovery (and one of the reasons to support its validity) is that thinking about hydration solids this way makes the math so so so much easier. Before this, if you wanted to calculate how water interacts with organic matter, you would need advanced computer simulations. Now, there are simple equations that you can do in your head. Being able to calculate a material's properties using basic physics principles is a really big deal, because so far we have only been able to do that with gasses (PV=nRT anyone?). Expanding that to a group that encompasses 50-90% of the biological world around us is huge.
older lotr illustrations sometimes depict éowyn wearing ridiculously small armour. apart from the problem general sexualisation of the only female character (who really does anything), there’s another hilarious thought:
éowyn pretended to be dernhelm, a man. to fit in, she must have worn men’s armor. so the armor in the illustrations is normal for rohirrim.
therefore, all the rohirrim rode to war just like that:
there’s a thundering sound in the distance as the rohirrim ride into war but rather than hoofbeats it’s the collective sound of all their cheeks clapping
Frank Frazetta was the reason He-Man was designed like that; the producers conduct a study to see what art appeal the most to children, and Frank’s work came out on top in popularity. So everyone in He-Man is dressed the way they are directly because of Frazetta.
Ah, it has been too long since I have seen the no pants post on my dash. And yes, this is a rare case where it wasn’t some sexist nonsense but an egalitarian No Pants Agenda.
I was reading one of my childhood diaries the other day and there was a whole paragraph saying how hopeful I was that my writing will help the archeologists in the far future. Then it proceeded to describe my lunch that day and how my dog was probably secretly able to talk.
#it IS of historical value#children's experiences are underrepresented in historical sources#it doesn't need well written or profound to be of historical value#comic#funny#art
there is a fucking statue of a kid who lived sometime in the 1200s, around 800 fucking years ago, because we have pieces of his homework that he doodled on while learning how to write. this is one of his drawings:
when I was googling him (because I couldn't remember his name), I stumbled across this twitter thread about him, which includes a different doodle by an italian boy in the 1400s of knights besieging a castle:
It's at the back of one of his schoolbooks for learning Latin.
ALL WE KNOW OF THESE KIDS IS STUFF THEY DREW WHILE THEY WERE BORED AND IT'S STILL HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT.
Also, because children's culture tends to be more conservative than adult cultire (in the sense of changing slowly, not in the sense of political conservatism), past children's experiences are often a fantastic key to the more remote past. Peter and Iona Opie documented a children's game in 1980s England that had remained essentially unchanged since the Roman Empire. It tends to be unusually easy to exaggerate or falsify this sort of thing, but that's all the more reason why documents by children themselves are so valuable.
@monstrousgourmandizingcats you’re killing me by mentioning this game so matter of factly and not naming it, Google is not finding me this and I really wanna know, what is it called? If that link were to have led me to it it’s not working for me
#is this specifically a German thing#because Germans tend to have Opinions about eggs#also the only people I know who actually know how to use an egg cup are German#teach me your ways - I still don’t understand why you’d use an egg cup. and I can’t imagine boiling eggs not in a pot on the stove
#why is the wobble an issue you pick them up one at a time shell then and eat them like not whole but just#you hold them and bite them and eat then till there's none left? why does this need extra tools
...at this point i'm sorry to introduce...the egg spoon.
Even better news about German egg related gadgets… the Eierköpfer (it also has a super long German name), for when you need a guillotine to open your egg neatly
A kind person whose social justice vocabulary is outdated or inadequate for the concepts they’re trying to communicate is a better person than anyone who’d rip them down as a bigot for not keeping up with the euphemism treadmill. Morality is measured by how you treat people, not how well you’ve memorized a continuously evolving set of shibboleths.
gummygunk
titsay
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
romaincrisis
